Principal Software Engineer ( Backend )

Our Mission At Palo Alto Networks®, we’re united by a shared mission—to protect our digital way of life. We thrive at the intersection of innovation and impact, solving real-world problems with cutting-edge technology and bold thinking. Here, everyone has a voice, and every idea counts. If you’re ready to do the most meaningful work of your career alongside people who are just as passionate as you are, you’re in the right place. Who We Are In order to be the cybersecurity partner of choice, we must trailblaze the path and shape the future of our industry. This is something our employees work at each day and is defined by our values: Disruption, Collaboration, Execution, Integrity, and Inclusion. We weave AI into the fabric of everything we do and use it to augment the impact every individual can have. If you are passionate about solving real-world problems and ideating beside the best and the brightest, we invite you to join us! We believe collaboration thrives in person. That’s why most of our teams work from the office full time, with flexibility when it’s needed. This model supports real-time problem-solving, stronger relationships, and the kind of precision that drives great outcomes. Job Summary . Palo Alto Networks' ADEM (Autonomous Digital Experience Management) group is seeking a Principal Software Engineer to serve as a primary architect and technical visionary for our backend ecosystem. In this high-impact role, you will be responsible for the technical roadmap of the ADEM data plane and control plane, ensuring our infrastructure remains the gold standard for SASE observability. You will solve the most complex distributed systems challenges, mentor the next generation of technical leaders, and bridge the gap between long-term product vision and world-class engineering execution. Your Impact Technical Strategy & Roadmap: Define the long-term architectural vision for ADEM backend services, ensuring scalability to support hundreds of millions of global endpoints and multi-petabyte telemetry streams. Architectural Governance: Lead the Design Review Board for the ADEM org, ensuring that all new services adhere to Secure AI by Design , high-availability patterns, and cost-efficient GCP utilization. AI/ML Integration at Scale: Drive the transition from traditional analytics to Agentic AI workflows , overseeing the backend orchestration required to power LLM-driven autonomous remediation. Cross-Functional Leadership: Partner with Product Management, Data Science, and DevOps to translate ambiguous business requirements into robust, high-performance technical specifications. Engineering Excellence & Mentorship: Act as a force multiplier by mentoring Staff and Senior engineers, fostering a culture of rigorous testing, high code quality, and proactive technical debt management. Crisis Leadership: Serve as the ultimate technical escalation point for complex, systemic production issues, leading post-mortems that drive permanent architectural improvements. Qualifications 12 years of software engineering experience , with a significant portion dedicated to designing and operating large-scale distributed systems in a cloud-native environment. Advanced AI-Augmented Development: As a leader in engineering efficiency, you must be an expert in leveraging AI-powered development tools—including Claude Code, Cursor, Windsurf, and GitHub Copilot—to radically accelerate the SDLC and automate complex refactoring and testing workflows. Distributed Systems Mastery: Proven track record of architecting systems that handle billions of events per day with strict sub-second latency requirements using Rust , Go (Golang), Java, or Python . GCP Principal-Level Expertise: Deep authoritative knowledge of the GCP ecosystem (GKE, Spanner, BigQuery, Pub/Sub, Dataflow) and the ability to optimize cloud spend through sophisticated architectural choices (FinOps). Data Plane Innovation: Experience building high-throughput, low-latency data pi ... (truncated, view full listing at source)